Finally. Finally the leader of a major distribution who has the guts to stand up and say what a lot of people have known for a long time, but didn't dare to say because it usually leads to a storm of criticism. Mark Shuttleworth has announced that Ubuntu will be moving away from X.org, opting to go with Wayland instead.

I fear this move, as it emphasizes glitter over utility. Network transparency is extremley useful, and is used far, far more often than most people realize.

Network transparency at the core of the display system simply isn't an essential feature for most people, especially if clinging to it is going to hold back the rest of the display architecture.

MS Windows core display system isn't network transparent, neither is Mac OS X. And yet, somehow people have found ways to work on them remotely. It isn't a real problem that requires sticking to x11 to the detriment of everything else.

Apple had to make this same choice 10-12 years ago, originally they WERE going to use x11 for Mac OS X but quickly realized that they'd have to cut it up into little pieces, shove them in a blender for 4 years and reassemble them in order to make it do what they wanted, so it was easier to just use something else.

MS Windows core display system isn't network transparent, neither is Mac OS X. And yet, somehow people have found ways to work on them remotely.

Err... Windows' UI system is actually more like X than you might think.

In terms of network support, there's really only one difference. In Windows, an application always talks to a display server directly, using local RPC and shared memory. The display server can act as a proxy, and send all that over the network. In X, network support is required in the applications, as well as the display server.

Having thought about this... I actually like the way Windows implements it. The trickier bits, like latency hiding, and handling the network protocol efficiently, are done by the UI system and the display server. They actually do a good job of it. In X, applications (or UI toolkits) are required to do this, and they do a lousy job of it. That's why you really need something like NX, which makes X over WANs actually usable...

Being network transparent is fine (although delegating that responsibility to applications is a bad idea). That's not the problem. The problem is the rest of the legacy crap X11 has built up over the years. At least Windows seems to implement most of the legacy crap on top of the current way of doing things. In X11, newer stuff has to be implemented on top of the legacy crap.

You forgot to mention how Windows interacts over the network compared to X-Windows. The big difference is that Windows only does full RDP protocol; and thus it only pushes the entire display - desktop, start menu, applications, etc - over the network as a whole. It has zero capability to isolate and send just a single application.

However, X-Windows can isolate single applications or send the whole display. It typically works by have the local system proxy to the remote system whereby the remote X-Windows server then does the actual drawing.

Want a full KDE/GNOME experience? Setup the X11 Port Forward and then run 'startx'.

Want just an application? Setup the X11 Port Forwarding and then run that application.

Can't do that with Windows. It's RDP or nothing (per native, built-in functionality since you can get applications, e.g. Cygwin, that can do it).

"I fear this move, as it emphasizes glitter over utility. Network transparency is extremley useful, and is used far, far more often than most people realize.

Network transparency at the core of the display system simply isn't an essential feature for most people, especially if clinging to it is going to hold back the rest of the display architecture.

MS Windows core display system isn't network transparent, neither is Mac OS X. And yet, somehow people have found ways to work on them remotely. It isn't a real problem that requires sticking to x11 to the detriment of everything else.

Apple had to make this same choice 10-12 years ago, originally they WERE going to use x11 for Mac OS X but quickly realized that they'd have to cut it up into little pieces, shove them in a blender for 4 years and reassemble them in order to make it do what they wanted, so it was easier to just use something else. "

Being an ex-NeXT/Apple Engineer your premise that Apple were moving to X is a joke.

WindowServer for Openstep and DPS was always never in doubt. What was in doubt became DPS with Adobe's absurd $10 fee on every copy of OS X and thus Display PDF was born within the minds of Peter Graffanino and other brilliant guys in his Quartz Team.

What Apple abandoned with Mac OS X wasn't X11 but Adobes Display Postscript technology, in favor of Quartz which is a sort of compositing engine built on 'display PDF'.

Display Postscript provided superior graphics in WYSIWYG printing and DTP environments, but the licensing fees seem to have been more than Apple was willing to pay, so it developed its own display model instead.

Sun Microsystems' X11 was extended to provide the needed Display Postscript support for OpenStep to run on Solaris, but this never played a part in Apple's decision making since NeXT OPENSTEP (the Mach 4.0/4.1/4.2 based operating system based on NeXT Computer and Sun Microsystems' joint efforts towards developing OpenStep as a platform neutral application and development environment, running on NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP, Sun Solaris and Windows NT, eventually leading Sun to develop Java in order to achieve the same goals) and not OpenStep (on Solaris) served as the basis of Mac OS X.